As a Diasporan Armenian playwright, I often wonder what priorities or instincts to follow. Must I tell the history of the Armenians? Should I write an Armenian play? Must it be a genocide play? What subject matter ought I spend the next six months to a year chiseling, molding and perfecting into shape? These questions, not matter how glib, recur without fail in the thoughts and emotions of a Diasporan playwright as he or she prepares to strike the keyboard every day, or, as one would say in bygone times, before pen hits paper, specific and purposeful choices must be made. Therefore, when I first discovered “Contemporary Armenian American Drama: An Anthology,” edited by Dr. Nishan Parlakian, published by Columbia University Press, 2004, I was elated. Dr. Nishan Parlakian, emeritus professor of drama at John Jay College, is himself a playwright and a director who has staged plays in Armenian and in English for many years. That someone had assembled in one place, a collection of plays about and by Armenians in the twentieth century was a great panoramic source of insight and inspiration to me and it was with that precise feeling that I embarked upon my journey of this book.
The chronological progression of the plays appropriately begins with “Ellis Island”, a fitting place to start our adventure even if the gates of this grand doorway are slammed shut on our protagonists, Anna, the old lady, and Peter, a professor from Lebanon. In this play by Raffi Arzoomanian, we intimately feel the importance of the rights of entry and also sense the importance of language in myriad ways, for it is the lack of the English language, which in the end, keeps Anna out of America. This is a play with a universality about the immigrant experience, both symbolically and metaphorically, which captures the fear of the unknown and the many twists of fate. I can only imagine how much more palpable these must have been when the play was actually performed within the main building at Ellis Island.
Our second stop is the more establishing piece called “The Armenians” by our greatest and most famous (Pulitzer prize rejecting) Armenian dramatist, William Saroyan. “The Armenians” is, as the title suggests, very Armenian. In fact, it is the most Armenian of the plays I have read by Saroyan. It is 1921 in Fresno and Armenians are discussing the plight of their old country and how they could possibly be of help. What better demonstration of the timelessness of a good story, when eighty-five years later, though circumstances are different, we are all still pondering the same question. And, not only does this world class author capture a piece of history marvelously, but I find myself wondering how much of his own story is told through the voices of such characters as Reverend Knadjian when he remarks “I find that I am most myself there, I am most real there, I am most deeply Armenian when I am in my study.” Is this Saroyan the man speaking himself and is this how we meet the man through his works?
Next, comes “Grandma Pray For Me,” a play by the editor of this volume himself, Dr. Nishan Parlakian. Though themes and ideas like this have been explored by many an Armenian writer, to do so through the medium of drama is a different thing altogether. I was extremely touched by the vision of the Grandma with her prayer beads sitting in the window symbolizing all our Armenian grandmothers together, praying as a last resort, helpless in the new country, waiting. This story moves along at a perfect pace and the quality of the writing is very poetic, as is that of the next play we come to.
Who can ever forget, even after one reading, the poignant words of the opening monologue of Barbara Bejoian’s “Dance, Mama, Dance.” “There is a concentration camp of the mind, in which women have been forced to dwell...” In one poetic phrase, she captures a predicament, which has haunted women for centuries. In this sophisticated piece, Bejoian depicts Armenian life in Watertown, MA, which, for an Armenian from a far away land, may come as a complete surprise.
In “Nine Armenians,” a well known play by Leslie Ayvazian, we see another illustration of the idea that no matter how completely different our Armenian experiences are or in which country we exercise them, they are still, in fact, Armenian. Here we see three generations of Armenian women with their feelings of chaos, of togetherness, with the shouting, the affection, the bonding, all captured so well in a mere sixteen short scenes. The play is as much a joy to read as it is to see performed.
Our next stop brings us to “Mirrors,” by Herand Markarian, where the results of trauma are shown through the extremes to which it hurls us and our human psyche. The subject of the Armenian Genocide is more directly approached here and exorcised via haunting memories that live on decades after the nightmare is over.
In the courtroom setting of “The Armenian Question,” by William Rolleri and Anna Antaramian, a Turkish general constantly attempts to derail the court on the question of the Armenian Genocide. This play, more than the others in this volume, deals directly with the question of the Genocide and the outrage it should cause among civilized nations and concludes with yet more unanswered questions.
The volume ends with the commanding “A Girl's War,” by Joyce Van Dyke which takes us from present day America all the way to the Karabagh conflict and entangles it all with the personal conflicts of the protagonists. This play is the most contemporary, attempting to unite our lives in one country with the struggles and realities of another to which we are so deeply attached.
The prevalent theme in these plays seems to be that of the Armenian Genocide, though other topics such as assimilation and the plight of women do enter the dialogue, there is no getting away from that huge cultural wound which, if you will, dominates the minds and expressions of all Armenians even today. Plays are meant to be seen, not necessarily read, but within a small ethnic group, where there is little opportunity for costly presentations, it becomes important to once again read plays to hear the voice of the people. For me, as a working playwright, to see what has already been done, clarifies what still needs to be done. Like a barometer, if you will, this book takes the pulse of contemporary Armenian drama.
And so, loud and clear, I heard the ancestral voices as Dr. Parlakian likes to call them, voices which, sooner or later, every person begins to hear. There are excellent notes provided before each play that orientate and help to trace the author and put into context what you are about to read. I welcome such a rich offering of Armenian contemporary drama and I applaud Dr. Parlakian for bringing this project to fruition as a worthy addition to the previous volume, Modern Armenian Drama, edited along with Peter S. Cowe. Together, these two tomes create a tremendously enriching and invaluable experience for a modern day Armenian playwright.
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BIANCA BAGATOURIAN:
I’d like to begin by making really quick introductions of my panelists and welcoming them all .
DAN ROTHENBERG -
Dan Rothenberg is a director & founding member & co-Artistic Director of Pig Iron Theatre Company, a physical theater ensemble based in Philadelphia. Their Hell Meets Henry Halfway which Dan directed, received an OBIE in 2004. Dan was also awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2002.
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Bianca: So, welcome everybody. Let’s begin making the invisible visible! OK. So what does that mean? Thoughts, concepts, stories. What is an invisible story? Hidden stories. Forbidden stories. Untold stories. Secret stories. I’d like to start with you Simon. I was thinking about “What I heard about Iraq” and that mantra as I watched it that kept repeating, I heard this, and I heard that, and I thought that was doing exactly what we’re talking about which is, by using the tool of repetition, to constantly make something which was just hearsay become visible by repeating it over and over. In watching that play I watched this whole transformation take place - of things that were just hearsay actually become real - and that was a very powerful thing to actually watch that transformation.
Simon: In 2005 when I created “What I heard about Iraq” from this very famous article by Eliot Weinberger, which basically traces the trail of lies that got us into a war with Iraq, and then the consequences of that war, I had no idea that I was acting as part of a movement. I just simply created the piece because I wanted to cry out about the illegality and the immorality of this war. I was really angry and very very upset. So, I got my theater company to commit to us presenting the play for just a two week run, just as a way of crying out and saying something about the war. What I have come to learn since September 2005 - and I thought the war would be over by now - that there is this phenomenon going on called “Verbatim Theater”. When we were at the Edinburgh festival this past summer, there were at least over a dozen shows that are now categorized as “Verbatim Theater” or “Fact Based Theater”. This is nothing new, for those of you who are old enough to remember, you know, Are You Now, Have You Ever Been, plays like that. This kind of theater has been around, but there has been a surge of fact based or verbatim theater, certainly in the last year or two, and a lot of it around the Iraq war. It started me thinking a lot of things and one of the main things is that thirty plus years ago, in the early seventies, when I first got involved in theater, as a baby, that one of the first things we did was bury the dead which was a protest against the Vietnam War. Even though that was fictionalized in many ways it was fact-based because it was about dead soldiers coming up and saying what it is that happens and how they feel and all of that. It tried to say something about war and what it does. All of that in this sort of book ending thing, has raised for me the larger question of “What is truth”? And what does that mean, especially in our country. It seems to me, and I’m speaking very personally, that it’s utterly true that the reasons why we are in this war and the result of this war are completely illegal and completely immoral and that enrages me to such an extent that as an artist I feel the need to cry out about it. And yet, as we go on and on and on with this conflict and we are forever faced with this polarization thing that goes on in the news about how we always have to have a republican and a democrat or somebody on the left and somebody on the right as if truth is somehow left and right, or blue and red, and that instead of really dealing with what I consider to be the truth, there seems to be this polarization of the truth. And so, why then are we as artists feeling this need to cry out? Why are we as artists feeling this need to be political? I’m beginning to wonder that this phenomena of this growth of Verbatim Theater is, “Are we the news now?” Have we become the news because we no longer believe in the news?
Bianca: That’s really interesting, do you think that people now expect theater to tell the truth?
Simon: I do. I mean, look, I think that if we factor out a percentage of commercial theater, or commercialization of theater, I think from Aeschylus on, we’ve expected theater artists to cry out about the wrongs at that particular time in society. And so, I think that we are forever making the invisible visible. I think that that’s what we do. I think that we are always trying to tell a kind of truth. At least a truth that is crying out inside us and hopefully is connected to a larger network of truth.
Bianca: Thank you, Simon. I think also besides just stories there’s also words, thoughts, concepts. Elana and I had a conversation about growing up bi-lingual, and how there’s always words that are missing in the English language that you are constantly trying to define. Words that don’t exist in English and vice versa. Do you find that in your work, Elana?
Elana: Yes, the constant awareness that if there’s no word for something it doesn’t exist in a particular culture. You can feel it, but if there is no word for it after the age of four when you become a verbal person, then you begin to think it doesn’t exist.
Bianca: The whole thing doesn’t exist, not just the word. That language encompasses the existence of the act.
Elana: Yes. Absolutely. There’s also, I think, there’s several things that make things seem invisible. They’re not invisible; it’s just that we just can’t see them. They’re there. There can be that there’s no word for it or there can also be a certain cultural mindset and certain educational practices that teach you to think in categories, so you can only define things within categories.
Bianca: So, maybe things aren’t just invisible, but it’s just about different ways of seeing and what you can see, I can’t see and other people can see and it’s about making that visible. It’s about different levels of seeing…and making things visible to different people.
Elana: For me it is. The way I approach it, that’s what it is. It has to do with how a work of art asks you to think and that if it’s asking you to think in a non-automatic way, it’s helping you then to see what falls in between the categories. If as a culture we define things as what they are not, or if we have a categorical way of thinking then certainly in between those places…I think certainly there’s a lot of beauty that we’re missing. In a more journalistic way, there’s a lot of stories and things going on that we’re missing. For me, in a core way actually, beginning to think in a non-categorical way is actually the place that reminds us that we are free. That to me is the core.
Bianca: So it’s these little spaces of non-existence where there’s no limitations or borders because often if things are invisible there’s no limits and you can just go on and on. It’s just endless.
Elana: Yes. You see them as they are, as they come up. I think it reminds us of a kind of an initial freedom. I tend to be really idealistic but I think we are born into that kind of freedom. I mean, I think that is initially where we start.
Bianca: Mac, do you want to talk a little about how you actually invent new words. You make up words.
Mac: I’ll tell you my favorite word of all time which is a word in the Finnish language:“Juoksentilisinkohan” which means “I think I shall wonder about without a definite sense of destination.”
I don’t know, I mean I’ve been giving away copies of this new book by a Princeton professor by the name of Berkhardt. Its called “On Bullshit”. It’s a wonderful little book because he says that we do know what truth is and we do know what lies are but for the bullshitter actually the distinction… bullshitting does not care. He would just as soon say the truth as lie. He’s not even a convicted liar. The only thing to be supported is the self, and the self image of the self. And that’s actually very theatrical. One thing you can say about our society if anything, is it’s overly-theatrical in every single level and that’s why most of the new kinds of theaters that are any good are anti-theatrical. Not necessarily the way Brecht is but someone more like Richard Maxwell is certainly, or Young Jean or everybody. So, I’m not sure I would make a dichotomy between the visible and invisible, that sounds a little Heiddegerian to me and we know about him. But I think that there is more stuff out there than there should be. This huge realm of bullshit which pervades everything in this culture is of great concern and getting rid of that, well...Making that invisible… (laughter) Stamp them out.
Bianca: And what might be a good way of doing that?
Mac: I do think though that theater that attempts to point out what actually happens or has happened is important. Probably more important now that it ever has been.
Bianca: Dan, you were telling me about some very interesting things you guys were working on at Pig Iron. I’d like to hear a little bit about that. It sounds fascinating to me. You’ve created a new acting style based on a Three Brain Theory. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Dan: Sure. Ummm, Pig Iron is a physical theater company based in Philadelphia. We make all of our work from scratch. Recently we’ve been playing with neuro-science research and trying to imaginatively attach that to acting. I don’t know if folks are familiar with this. I think neuro-scientists don’t actually like to talk about this theory but psychiatrists really do. The three brain theory; you cut down the neo-cortex of the human brain and you find what’s underneath resembles a dog brain and if you keep cutting down you find what resembles a reptile brain…a lizard brain. This guy Paul Maclean posited that each of these brains evolved over time, each of them has their own subjectivity, their own memory, their own sense of space. We’ve been playing around with this. We are an acting style in search of material now. Trying to go back into the lizard brain and I’m sort of speaking in tongues. I’m missing day three in rehearsal right now so I can’t say too much about it. But I was thinking about what some of the other panelist said about this phrase Inattentional blindness.There’s this great neuro-science experiment called Gorillas in our Midst. You ask the subjects to take a look at this video of people playing basket ball and count how many times the team in white scores and in the middle, in the stands behind them, someone comes out in a gorilla suit, bangs on his chest and walks away and you say did you notice anything unusual, anything different in that video and the majority of the people said that the team in the white suit scored a lot and do not see the person in the gorilla suit. I guess I’m interested in what the both of you were saying about this, that certainly the information is out there but…
Mac: That’s the kind of episode I try to use exclusively when writing plays. Gorilla comes in which nobody sees. If I could make a play totally with those things, I’d be the greatest genius of all time.
Dan: My theater company has gone to Poland a few times…(laughter). Alright lets talk about and the gorilla.
Mac: We’re anti-gorillas.
Dan: Once I met this guy who said that he had Tadeusz Kantor’sstudent at an art class. He said in the seventies and eighties they didn’t have any books of paintings, the country was totally closed but because of Kantor’s prominence, he was able to tour. The company was touring all around the world and he would bring back these forbidden books of modernist paintings…smuggle them essentially into the country and have this art seminar in his living room...This illegal art seminar where these Polish students would hungrily devour the catalogues from English editions. That moment has really ceased my imagination. I think all of us, as artists would love to bring that feeling to our audiences. This feeling of, you know, I smuggled this in just for you. You’re not allowed to see it. Nobody else can see it. The audience is feeling hungry, saying “Oh, I know that there are things that have been kept from me and I’m so hungry to find out these things”.
You know the funny thing about communism and meeting the artists from the former soviet block is the bewilderment that they feel now because communism was a good deal for the artist in some ways because everyone had a job. Everybody knew what they could talk about and what they couldn’t talk about which was the terrible political regime that they were living under and now they’re faced with what we’re faced with which is this glut of information and possibility and the mistaken belief that you can choose choose choose everything, and I’ll just pick my channels and my webcast and my little slipper that meets me the ideal consumer. Something that my company is struggling with, and I imagine all of us are, is how to create that feeling of...There’s still things that Inattentional Blindness causes to be invisible, as we are saying, there’s still things that need to be smuggled in, but how to create that feeling of smuggling something in that people are hungry for is quite difficult in an age where we are told that we can have anything we want and consume anything we want.
Bianca: Betty, I wanted to talk to you all little bit about how you actually make the Arab American voice heard in America, both in your monologs and in your work. That’s a really important thing, making voices of different cultures heard that don’t exist. Thinking as an Armenian playwright myself, I know that those voices are rare and hard to find. Can you tell us a little about that.
Betty: Sure. I think images of Arabs, and this is related to what this gentleman was just saying, are not invisible. There are plenty of images of Arabs, they’re just depleted of their humanity. And the consequence of that is what happened with the Iraq war. How it was sold to the American people was the equivalent of saying Bolivia attacked America so we are going to attack Argentina. And there is such a level of ignorance about the Arab world and racism that has been fostered that people buy that and I think culture has an important role to play in making people who are visible have also humanity. They are not just images of screaming people throwing rocks or women who are hooded, or suicide bombers. That’s something that’s really important to me. I’m an artist first and I’m creating things that I hope will last long after all these conflicts have resolved themselves. I think that that’s really important. What’s also important is that in order to talk about being an Arab-American in a way that a primarily American audience will understand...The level of racism...I have to say it’s like this; I have to say it’s like thinking just because people speak the same language, they’re the same culture or have the same history, in order for people to get the fact of how absurd the idea of 9/11 being connected to the Iraq invasion was. And that’s very frustrating. But the other thing I wanted to talk about, because I’m very much trying in this environment to hold on to my connectedness as an artist, is what I think is lacking, aside from the humanity of certain people who it behooves us to dehumanize, and that is emotional truth. If you get people together and sit and have a conversation with somebody, no one will listen to you for two hours. Nobody. Not even your mother. Your shrink, but you have to pay him a lot. And you’re gathering people in an off-Broadway or a decent sized house, a hundred seats, for two hours. That’s two hundred hours of peoples energy and time listening to what you have to say and if you don’t put something out there that’s emotionally true, that’s normally invisible, from your interior gut and what you have to say, you are wasting two hundred hours of people’s time that could be spent eating, fucking, organizing. That’s an enormous responsibility as a playwright. And so I wanted to talk about both those things, emotional truth and also making invisible the humanity of certain people, even though you’re showing images of them.
Bianca: You mentioned responsibility. As playwrights, do you think we have a responsibility of making these unheard stories heard?
Betty:I think…It’s so hard to write a fucking play, excuse me, I’m very sorry, I’m in a kind of a swearing mood…that I don’t think that can’t be the primary reason to write a play, but I think that it plays a huge role in how you’re perceived. I mean, if there were more stories about Arab Americans, this war could not have been sold to the American public as something that’s reasonable. That you can connect one Latin American country to another because there’s so little known. Not that we know so much about Latin America, bit I’m just showing you that level of ignorance about the Arab world. I think if there was even that basic level that we have about Latin America known- but I don’t think it’s my responsibility as a playwright to educate people. I don’t think I have the potential to change people minds about things that they’re fixed about. I mean, if you’re anti-abortion and you see the most pro-choice play, it’s not going to affect you. You have a responsibility to yourself as an artist, but you also have a responsibility to your audience to show them emotional truth and what they do with that, you can’t control.
Bianca: That’s interesting what you said about if there were more stories about Arabs. I’d like to go back to what were talking about a little earlier regarding Simon’s play. That repetition tool. I do think that once something is made visible, you then have to constantly work at it to keep it visible, otherwise it fades away. Once you have a lot of stories that build up this big wave, then it’s harder to overcome. That’s why I agree that it’s important for all these ethnic stories to be heard so much. I want to talk briefly about something that happened a few weeks ago. I’m an Armenian playwright and a few weeks ago I was very saddened to hear that a Turkish-Armenian writer was shot in Turkey for writing about a forbidden story. He wrote about the Armenian Genocide. I think that’s appalling that in this day and age somebody can get shot and killed right in front of their office for their opinions… It’s so awful. Even today, before this session, someone informed me that there are no books in the library system about the Armenian Genocide.. .They all have been removed. Who is doing the removing?
Betty: I think what’s particularly interesting about the story of the Armenian who was shot in Turkey is that he is an Armenian that didn’t move to Armenia. He wanted to stay in Turkey. He wanted to stay and change the society that he was living in. I think that more of that needs to happen as opposed to separation and that’s why it’s so particularly heartbreaking that he was shot.
Bianca: The Armenian community in Turkey is dwindling because it’s so scary. In the last 15 years, 18 journalists have been killed in Turkey. It’s not a fun place to be.
Betty: Which makes it particularly brave to me that he was there.
Bianca: Extremely brave. He was very vocal about the Genocide. He was the editor of a newspaper and he had been receiving death threats for many many months. It’s difficult, as an Armenian playwright, I sit down and the minute I put pen to paper, the first thing that comes to my mind is this huge cultural block that exists within our society. I feel that unless I write about the Genocide, I’m not being a good or loyal Armenian. It is really hard to get past this. Now more and more stories are coming out about this subject from all different angles and circles which is helping to build up this momentum and that is great. But it’s still really hard as a playwright to sit down and say OK, I’m going to skip this huge blind spot in the world today and I’ll just write about on my own thing.
Mac: Do you know the playwright Kelly Stuart?
Bianca: Yes, yes we’ve talked.
Mac: She’s been doing research. She’s learning Turkish. She’s been reading a lot about that stuff. I think that’s an encouraging sign. People who have no connection to the region at all are drawn to it and want to investigate and write their own stories. I’m always curious what people in theater mean by story. What they usually mean is a kind of sentimental melodrama and I think that there are more kinds of stories than just that. I particularly think that some of the topics that are being addressed today demand a different type of storytelling. I don’t know exactly what. But if it’s just a sad story about somebody who is oppressed and killed, it’s easy to trivialize it.
Betty: Well, it’s also easy to shut it off.
Mac: I think we need new ways of telling stories in the theater.
Elana: Doesn’t that also have something to do with this kind of automatic thinking or defining things? Because as long as you keep that way of thinking, everything you hear about goes into those pre-existing boxes.
Mac: Yeah. You know I am haunted by what I call “the pool of the already known.” It’s always one step behind you. All the opinions, all the assumptions just eat you up and make you as stupid as Bush or the Bush democrats that run things. . But I’m always more in interested in what I know that I didn’t know that I know. That’s the only thing that’s interesting. And I think we’re facing a lot of things in this world that demand a new kind of story telling. It is a world replete with bullshit. Eliot Weinberger, somebody mentioned, said we live in a time of the overproduction of virtually everything. And there’s something about a society that just belches an endless succession of identical things or things that look like each other that is deeply and profoundly confusing. Over theatricalized.
Bianca: You mentioned new kinds of story telling. Can you elaborate on that?
Mac: I think you can explore storytelling by looking at how stories first were told. Look at biblical stories. I always like to look at Malory who wrote Le Morte D’Arthur. The way those Arthurian tales are told are completely different than the way than they are told now. And my all time favorite book is the Welsh book of tales from Mabinogionwhich is so crazy but beautiful, and the stories are…well, I don’t have time to tell them but they are just completely strange.
Bianca: Elana, Can you talk a little about your cross-genre work between your poetry and your fiction.
Elana: Well, first of all, just jumping off what Mac said, I don’t know if any of you who want to should rent this movie “Idiocracy” that didn’t get released but it certainly takes what’s going on in this country right now, the categorical thinking, this over-commodification five hundred years from now seriously. It’s really a forceful piece. But anyway, one thought I had was actually about one of Mac’s plays, Whirligig. I was thinking about it because right towards the beginning, this girl is at a bus stop and there’s this voiceover, the bus is leaving and there is all these places the bus is going on it’s way, but these are like places that are very hard to put into any context. They’re just impossible to locate in any kind of automatic way and I think in a sense, I don’t know, but maybe that’s kind of approaching a new way of telling things. Right at the start, what the play is asking you to do is to think in a different way. Just by those lists of places that you cannot locate. There’s no way you can contextualize them, there’s no nationalism, there’s no beaurocracy. They’re just these incredible words that mean something that exist somewhere. I think if you can start out asking the audience to think in that way, you know, the possibilities of different kinds of stories can be communicated. I think it’s very hard to take certain kinds of stories in, I don’t meant to be extreme, but because we’re a little brainwashed. That thing about not seeing…I read that there’s these incredible stories from a long time ago about islands that were far away. A ship would come and they couldn’t see it. It’s the most astounding thing. The shaman could see it. But the rest of the people on the island, they could not see the ship. That’s pretty profound.
Mac: I think the saddest thing about our storytelling both in the theater and elsewhere is that we don’t allow for gaps. For holes. Gaps and swerves and turns. So we think we end up knowing everything and there’s very little room in our heart for the humility of not knowing everything. And that’s why we’re such a grinning, preachy, war-like people. We think we know fucking everything. We know nothing. It’s my favorite Henry James quote, “Nobody knows anything.” Doesn’t sound like Henry James.
Bianca: Mac, could you talk a little bit about just the language of your plays. How you work with language and build new words. I’m always fascinated by that because you’re physically making new things.
Mac: Well, I’m just interested in that stuff. There was a group of playwright yesterday talking and it was about inspiration and I think that creativity and inspiration is one of the most horrible of religious concepts. I wrote a play called Harm’s Way, partly because I think the word harm is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. I wrote it at a time where there is a lot of discussion of violence in American society. I had a problem with this. Because violence I think can be very good. Violence is beautiful in sports and love and nature. But harm is something else. And its actually more precise. So, I don’t know if the play is any good but it enabled me to write it and to be a little bit more precise about what I was trying to do. So, in that sense, yeah.
Bianca: I’m going to read something that I took from The Invention of Tragedy, “An inch to to near the can of can not.” I thought that was lovely.
Mac: That’s a play for a chorus of a thousand and one children. Now, needless to say, I’m having some difficulties. The director and I would go to schools people look at us and say “Oooooh, maybe you should go away now.” I never think you should attempt anything you know how to do.
Bianca: Simon, can you tell us a little about the Fountain Theatre. I’m very interested in how they give voice to a lot of ethnic groups. I know you guys do a lot of Armenian plays which I’m very happy about.
Simon: I just think that theater, especially those of us who have theaters in large cosmopolitan areas that are truly melting pots, that the responsibility of that theater is to give voice to those different communities. We expend a lot of energy, searching for stories. We tend to do a lot of African American themed plays. Obviously Armenian-American. The Fountain Theatre is in an area called Little Armenia so it seems to me that makes sense that we do that. We haven’t been as successful addressing our Latino or Hispanic or Chicano communities. That’s something were working on. We have strong presence with the hard of hearing communities which we have a particular love for. It goes on and on, gay and lesbian etc. etc. But mostly it’s about our hearts. It’s about what we care about. We’re sort of a quadrumvirate; I don’t know what other term to use. We’re four primary voices in the theater and we all have passions about particular things that we care about and we try to give expression to those passions.Bianca: Betty, in what ways do you think the theater community can help the emergence of Arab American voices?
Betty: Have balls and produce them! It’s astounding to me that you can have in the Oscar season, Munich and Syriana, and Goodnight and Good Luck, and the Obies, not even the Tonies, but the Obies are not even honoring that kind of political work. To me that’s astounding. It maybe that theater is so marginal that people are afraid to take risks, but to me, I feel it every time I face a board. It’s difficult to talk about these issues but the people in the theater community need more balls. It was just astounding to me that I just watched the Oscars, knowing what the Obies are honoring. It’s not because the Obies or the Tonies don’t want to honor political work, it’s just that none of the political work is being done, you know, and there are many many up and coming young Arab American artists and artists of other ethnicities that are trying to get their voices out there, but I always say, artistic directors are like deli owners. If you buy a certain type of sandwich, then they’ll make that sandwich. So we need to also generate audiences of people who are interested in other things. But I also think there’s an incredible lack of nerve on the part of many many artistic of directors in this country, and that’s why we trying to play catch-up with Hollywood, which to me is unbelievable.
Bianca: There is also a real lack of grants and scholarships for up and coming writers of ethnic backgrounds.
Betty: No. I think there’s a plethora of grants, but there’s not a plethora of productions.
Bianca: Are there grants specifically for Arab-Americans?
Betty: No, but I think there are more grants than there are opportunities to develop. And the fact of the matter is that most plays are bad. And most plays are done by white men. So, we should mix it up a bit. Even as a women. Like there was some study that fifteen percent new plays were written by women. If you go to medical school or law school, you’re in a class that’s fifty-fifty. if you’re a playwright, you’re fifteen percent of the new plays that are being produced? That’s astounding in this day and age. Get some balls, you know?
Bianca: And on that note, we have about five minutes left. I’d like to open up the floor for some questions.
Audience Question: I’m really interested in strategies for bringing emotional truth and new ways of story telling into theater. What are some strategies that you think are possible if that emotional truth or if that story-telling is not comfortable for the audience or if it’s challenging. In my own experience, I feel that when I bring something that is a little more challenging, the audience is upset. They don’t come back.
Mac: Then you have the wrong audience. See your work has to find the kind of audience it deserves. Just because you’re friends with somebody doesn’t mean they’ll like you work. Particularly when you’re starting out. That is the case. I found myself repeatedly not liking the people who liked my work, and the people I respected, didn’t like my work. So I thought, what’s going on here. And so, I decided to imitate the people whose work I did like. That’s the only way you learn anything anyway. That’s how you learn structures. You want to write a well-made play, imitate one. I do that actually in class once in a while. I go around and say what’s the best play that was ever written.
Simon: I was struck when I heard About Iraq ran at our theater for five months and after every performance we had a talkback and in every single talkback, one of the very first things that people said is, well you need to be doing this for Republicans and for people that are for the war. And then I would pose back to them well, do you think those people would pay twenty-five dollars to come see this play? No one knew how to answer that question. Through that experience, what I came to understand was that theater really is religious. It’s our church. It’s a place where mantras happen. Whatever your faith may be, we go back to time and time again, whether it’s is the torah or the bible or etc. etc., we go back to theater to be re-innervated about something, to be reminded about a kind of basic truth in regards to humanity. So, to me it was important that those people were there. They were there to be reminded of something. They were there to be re-energized about something. That’s where I think emotional truth is, ultimately. So about this issue of preaching to the converted, well who else are preachers preaching to? Aren’t we preachers ultimately? Aren’t we priests? The original playwrights were priests, or some of them were.
Audience Question: I have a question about the brain. One of the things that I’m fascinated with is the idea of the barbaric or the savage versus the civilized. I know the reptilian brain is your oldest portion of your brain so I’m sort of curious in terms of the work that you are doing. How are you breaking down those brain parts?
Dan: Sure. First of all, our company are not neuro-scientists, so we’re giving ourselves the freedom to work imaginatively with these three brains. I guess we’re actually looking at the three brains and looking at the work of Anton Chekhov at the same time. I thought, just to give a quick primer on this, the reptile brain controls the things like reflex, hunger, breathing, sleeping. The dog brain is the seat of emotions and hierarchies and territory, but it has only one emotion at once. The human brain deals with problems and is very given to ambivalence and logic and has the ability to imagine a future. I thought the dog brain was going to be a mystery but actually it’s the human brain that turns out to be the mystery. This thing about emotional truth actually or anything that comes from the dog brain or the lizard brain is what we call a good play, or visceral acting, or something that people care about. We’re looking at these Chekhov plays and all the behaviors that go in there and starting to say that actually these Chekhov plays are about this new dog that comes in and stakes out his territory and everybody else keeps talking about the future and the past, while this new dog is pushing everybody out of the house and establishing himself. I guess, barbaric versus the civilized...I guess this project, like many projects that we’re all doing are just another way of trying to figure out why people do what they do. Is there sense or is there nonsense? Getting in touch with other rhythms of expression-
Bianca: Any last questions?
Audience Question: Mr. Wellman, I’m wondering what you think of my assessment. I teach your Seven Blow Jobs, if you don’t know it you must read it. It’s supposed to be about something pornographic. We never see the photo that is the center of everyone’s attention. I think it’s a wonderful piece. You’re making the invisible visible in our minds. What do you say to that?
Mac: I don’t know what to say.
Audience Question: Did you think that we’re all going to come up with a different reaction to what is on the photo?
Mac: Yeah. Well, that happened during the Mapplethorpe brouhaha and I waited like six months for one of the better class of playwrights to write what seemed to be the most obvious play to write. No one did it so I had to do it. But it’s also written in basic English, like a sixth grade book. It’s like a primer for how to use something as a pretext for censorship, which is so easy to do. I’m actually amazed I’m not rich and famous because of this play, but there’s no justice in the world.
Audience: There are no blow jobs!
Bianca: OK. I think we have come to an end now. I want to thank everybody for coming and to thank all my panelists.
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Interview with Michael Goorjian -
By Bianca Bagatourian, 2006
Michael Goorjian wrote, directed, acted and produced the film.ILLUSION, a feature length film starring Kirk Douglas. It is a father son relationship story in which the father gets a second chance to rewind back his life and change a few decisions. Here, Goorjian discusses the film in an interview with Bianca Bagatourian from the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance (ADAA).
BIANCA:– Thanks for doing this interview Michael, I know how busy your schedule is. I'd like to discuss your new film Illusion starring Kirk Douglas. How did you get Kirk interested, especially after he had just had a stroke?
MICHAEL: –Actually, he wasn't my first choice. We went to a few other actors originally. But then the idea of Kirk Douglas came up, and at first, like everyone else, we assumed he'd never even consider it. But once he read the script and saw some of the footage which I had already shot, he agreed right away. He was so into the project that we spent over a month rehearsing, which is very unusual, especially on an independent film.
BIANCA:–I heard Kirk say in a phone interview that the script resonated with him. I think he was referring to the father and son story and how that made him think of himself and that perhaps he had been too busy to be a good father as well. That's pretty powerful.
MICHAEL: –Kirk also reflects the ultimate message of the film, that it is never too late to change your ways and make amends.
BIANCA:–I’m not sure if this is correct, but is this really his last film?
MICHAEL: –That what he says. These days he's focused mainly on his writing and the various charitable causes he's involved with. He just published a new memoir, I think it’s called Let's Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving, and Learning and it’s a book full of his life stories. I think he sees the film "Illusion" as a good note to end his acting career on.
BIANCA:–I can imagine what a tremendous amount you must have learned in making this film. It must have been an incredible experience...Writing, directing, acting and producing the whole thing. What would you say was the most important thing that you learned on this journey?
MICHAEL: – All honest, hard work pays off in one way or another. This is an undeniable truth.
BIANCA:–How long exactly did this whole process of making the film take? From the moment you conceived it until it was shot and edited?
MICHAEL: –It took over five years. I shot the film in pieces. I'd shoot a portion, then use what I had shot to raise money to do the next section, and so on and so on. All in all, I think in the end there were a total of eight shoots.
BIANCA: –It really is a beautiful looking film visually as well as being very engaging. Was that "look" what you as a director had in mind to create as you were shooting the film?
MICHAEL: –Going with the idea of the Akashic Records, I felt that everyone's records or personal movies would probably all look different since we experience life in so many different ways. So, each period of the son's life was literally done in different genres. We tried to convey that in everything from the style of dialogue, to how it was shot, to the music. We did this also with the father's story.
BIANCA:–That’s pretty amazing. You know Michael, we are so pleased to have you involved with the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance. It is really fantastic to have you on board. You mentioned that you recently took a trip to Armenia and how much you enjoyed it. So can we soon expect an Armenian film?
MICHAEL: – There is a film that one day I'd like to make about a particular Armenian. It would be a historic piece, some of which would take place in Armenia
BIANCA: – So you have plans to go back to Armenia?
MICHAEL: –Yes, I in fact I will be on the jury for this years Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan. I can't wait to go back. Yerevan is truly one of the most wonderful cities in the world that I have ever been to.
BIANCA: –Can you share with us what your next project is at this time?
MICHAEL: –I'm writing a script called "Beatrice" which is a mystery/love story that takes place in Mendocino, California.
BIANCA: –And now for the last question, if you could make any film in the world and had millions of dollars. what would you make?
MICHAEL:– That would be the Armenian film I mentioned earlier. I don't have a script yet so that's all I can say about it at this point.
BIANCA: – Thanks Michael, it is always a pleasure....
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This exclusive interview was granted to the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance (ADAA) in November 2005. Simon Abkarian is the very gifted Armenian-Lebanese-French actor whose work has mainly been seen in French movies and on the Paris stage. The interview was conducted on a Sunday afternoon over the telephone from Boston to Paris. It began with Simon first on a train and then arriving home and from the sound of things preparing dinner before we settled into a more quiet period. The conversation diverted from more esoteric theories about time to more practical ones about one of his latest movies “YES,” where Simon plays a Lebanese doctor in exile, making his living as a cook. For authenticity, please imagine the entire interview in a thick French accent!
Simon – Allo.
Bianca –Hi Simon, this is Bianca. Hello.
Simon –Hi.
Bianca – Can we talk now?
Simon – Yes. Yes. So, tell me. What’s happening?
Bianca – I wanted to do a short interview as people in the US don’t know too much about you...Where you are from...What you do and so on. Is it OK if I tape this?
Simon – Of course. Go ahead.
Bianca – We will be posting this interview on or website. Is that OK?
Simon –Do what you want with it. As long as we have a good talk.
Bianca –Before we start, is it Simon or Simone?
Simon –My name is Simone. In America, they call me Simon, but you can call me anything you like.
Bianca –OK, Simon. Let’s start with some background. Have you lived in Paris for a long time?
Simon –I was born in Paris. I went to Lebanon when I was nine. I stayed there until I was fifteen. Then the war started and we had to leave. So we left.
Bianca – Where is your family now?
Simon –My family lives in Paris. I have cousins in America and in Lebanon.
Bianca - What first attracted you to acting?
Simon- It began actually in 1983 with an Armenian play I saw directed by Gerald Papasian. He was running a theatre company, the Artavadzt for the AGBU. So I joined the company, we became friends, and then we came to Los Angeles in 1984 where he directed “Dangerous Corner” by J.B. Priestley
Bianca – That’s wonderful. So, having the AGBU theater was very helpful to you.
Simon- Well, yes. But it is mostly linked to the person. In this case, it was Gerald. He is so charismatic and so dedicated to his art. It happened like that. Then the Theatre du Soleil came to Los Angeles in 1984 and I knew some of the people in different there and I joined the workshop and I had a proposal to come back and to do auditions and join the company of Theatre du Soleil.
Bianca - You did a lot of work on the stage before you did movies, is that right?
Simon- That is where I come from. It is my motherland.
Bianca -I read you won a Moliere. Was that for your performance in the “Beast on the Moon”?
Simon- That was years after. A Moliere is only because of many years of work.
Bianca – What is your favorite role that you have played in the theatre?
Simon- The Greek Tragedy- Oresteia (Aeschylus). This is where I went into dimensions I never imagined existed. Meanwhile, I felt at home because it is very close to Armenian. As an Armenian actor, I felt like I knew what it was all about.
Bianca - I saw the movie “YES” and found it very interesting because it was written in verse and I’m wondering if it was difficult playing a role that in iambic pentameter?
Simon- I never thought about the rhyming. What was important was what it contained...What was being said. When you have such a thing...how you say that...it’s like a partition. It puts you in front of your art...your tool...because it’s written the way it is. So, it was not an obstacle...on the contrary, it was so well written. The form didn’t kill what it was all about. You know what I mean? The form was the expression to make it happen...to make it clear.
Bianca -How was it working with Sally Potter?
Simon- When I worked with Atom Egoyan...And I guess the next time we work together and I think it will happen again one day...I don’t know when and how but I think both of us desire that...but working with Atom in that film, I didn’t have much room...and I was not carrying Atom’s film...I was not responsible, but with Sally it was the case. Working with both Sally and Atom were one of the most important encounters I’ve ever had in he cinema. The encounter with Sally was one of the most important moments for me in my life...In my acting life.
Bianca -Did you know Sally Potter before this movie?
Simon- I met her when she was Shooting “The Man Who Cried” and I went to audition for a part in her film, the part of a gypsy and we had the opportunity to talk and we talked about each other and obviously she did not forget so she called me back for another short film that became the long one called “Yes”.
Bianca –Tell me how working with Atom in Ararat was an important moment for you?
Simon- It was a very important moment because first of all, Atom is an artist. He will never let the subject overrule...be stronger than him. Atom is someone who has distance. He has the distance because he has the poetry. You understand what I’m saying? He knows how to transpose life in very simple ways and as we know, in art, simplicity is the most difficult thing. Simplicity doesn’t take away the complexity of the relation and whether we want it or not...our relation to humanity...our relation to the work because of the Genocide...is very complex. The Genocide is a past important moment in our lives but our life is not only the Genocide. You have to keep the distance. That is what Atom did, within his writing first of all...Because we tend to forget the writing sometimes, we always look for result, but it is not only about results...the whole process is in the writing.
Bianca –I wanted to talk about Beast on the Moon again for a moment. Firstly, how was that play received in France and secondly, can you tell us a little about some other stage experiences.
Simon- I didn’t want to do it, first of all. For me, it has a certain importance in my mind. I didn’t know how, who, where and why. Then when I met Irina (Brook) we got to work and it took me awhile to feel comfortable. Why? I can’t give an explanation because it’s a mystery. Sometime you just don’t want to do something...You have a feeling...But because it is theater...It is a tool to talk about the nightmare.
Bianca -So it’s a positive tool. Do you think we should have more and more plays about the subject of Genocide?
Simon- I think the sooner they can recognize the Genocide, the sooner we can move on to other things. It is not the center of the Armenian history. Of course, it is an important part of the picture. Now it is time for the Turks to declare it not only for us, but for themselves...So we can talk about other things. They have to do their job. We cannot do their job. They have to do their own and we have to do our own. We were in front of the blade, they were behind the handle.
Bianca – So many of us are stuck in this place-
Simon- Yes, but how can you blame us? It’s a big trauma and the fact of being stuck is matching the absurdity of the denial. Do you understand what I am saying? As long as there is denial, there will be obsession. If they take away the denial, we will be obsessed, but with something else, maybe shish kebab, I don’t know. We will obsess about something.
So, that’s why I think that Atom’s work in this film, within this subject, is the first pawn of a big edifice that is important to build in order to contain our lost icons...Our losses. If we don’t have the recognition of our past, we cannot build the present, neither the future. So, that’s why it is important to go and support Armenians when they do things like this. By going to see them we make a statement...We help the process...And then open the debate after having seen it.
When an artist does a piece...Of course, we all want to be praised and loved...but an artist is beyond being praised and loved. Atom is doing something beyond that. He is doing something for the eternity of the Armenian nation and the human family and we have to understand that and support that. If we criticize that, it is because his film brought the question to our minds. Without the film, we wouldn’t have opened the debate. Do you understand? And this is the work of the artist and Atom understands it because he is a true one and voila! This is not a film about the Genocide. This is a film about questioning ourselves. It is about the Turks questioning themselves. It is about the other nations questioning themselves towards this problem which is part of the problem of the human race. When people say, “What is your problem? What is the problem of the Armenians?” I say to them it is your problem. Everything is linked. Especially now with globalization, everything is so close.
Me, I don’t want to spend all my life being focused on 1915. I don’t want to live my life like that. But there is one magic act that they have to do and that is to say “Yes.”
Bianca – The missing act.
Simon- To say, our grandfathers did it. It’s not the Germans. It’s not the Kurds. It is not this, it is not that. It is the Young Turk government which were there in 1909, organized in a bureaucratic way, coming from the state...the Genocide. That’s all. That’s all they have to do.
Bianca – I think every Armenian artist is faced with this. Do you move forward or do you stay there? We need to heal the wounds.
Simon- Maybe it’s not even good to heal it but at least if they say, “The wound you have...We did it.” Then we manage with the wound.
Bianca – We seem as a culture...as a people to be a traumatized one. Our music is sad, our poems are sad. We are sad in a general way and maybe it is from this enormous trauma.
Simon- Yes, it is but also but it is not only about being wounded. This is a vast subject. There is another way of relating to God, there is another way of relating to death, there is another way of relating to birth, there is another way of relating to the earth. That doesn’t make us better or worse than others. But we have a different way of seeing things and we have to accept the differences. When you go to Armenia, you feel it. When you go to Greece, you feel it. When you go to Turkey, you feel it, etc. etc. Allow me to say that I feel somehow closer to a Turk that I feel to a Danish, and God knows I love the Danish. It is a closer vibration. We understand each other.
Bianca –OK. Let’s move forward. Here’s a different subject. Whilst establishing our new organization, ADAA, I noticed that in France there is a rather large and active Armenian film community and theatre, too. Why is that?
Simon- It is easier to get funding for films over here. Now it is getting a bit difficult but back in the eighties, it was a good moment for Armenian artists to express themselves. One of them was Serge Avedikian, and Jacques Kebadian and Jackie Nercessian...all these people...I don’t know...I cannot tell you more about this phenomena.
Bianca – What kind of roles do you look for?
Simon- I don’t look for roles, I look for adventures with people who want to defend a project with a story about humans. Also, I want to touch everything, I want to try everything, I want to taste, I want to understand, to see things that I don’t know...Spaces I want to explore because it’s unknown to me. I want to improve in my craft.
Bianca – Would you like to direct?
Simon- A film? Of course.
Bianca -So, the big question now is, are you interested in coming to Hollywood?
Simon- If I have a proposal I will do it. If it’s not intelligent, if it’s not a character caricature, if it is an intelligent proposal, then I will do it. Listen, the aim is not Hollywood.
Bianca – I wish Hollywood would make more films similar to Independent films.
Simon- It is all a business. For instance, you know all this about talk about organic food. It is not true. It is all a business.
Bianca - I eat organic-
Simon- I eat organic food too. But that is not the problem. When they know that there is money to make, they will do more independent films, too. They will adapt themselves, that’s what I’m saying.This is the law of the market. Listen, the secret of a happy life for me is the slow-ness and when we talk about evil...the word evil...the ultimate evil ever is “hurry.” Dashing…hurrying-
Bianca -Then I must be very evil-
Simon – Why? Well no, it’s because you obey the law of the place you live. Me, I don’t eat fast food, for example, because eating is a sacred act. Fast food in itself is a heresy. So, that’s what I am talking about. You cannot do something good, fast. You cannot fit something big in something small. You cannot fit a big foot in a small shoe...You suffer.
Bianca: As a writer, I’m very fascinated by this whole element of time. How it slows down and then goes faster...At different times, it moves at different speeds.
Simon: Yes, yes. But because we are obsessed by the result, we like to go fast. Because the demand of the market is to produce a lot and very fast.
Bianca: Especially in America.
Simon: Not just America. All around the world.
Bianca: But isn’t America the extreme?
Simon: I don’t know. I am not pointing at America in particular, I am talking about the life we are living in-
Bianca: The time we are living in.
Simon: Yes, it’s like that. This is also the misunderstanding between the east and the west. They look lazy... unproductive...and they are sometimes inefficient. But they’re not. That is the way they live. And from our point of view, they are lazy. Me, I am an adept of slow.But slow is not being loose. It has nothing to do with being loose. It has nothing to do with that. You can be firm and slow.
Bianca: Disciplined?
Simon: Yes. But we tend to be racist towards this word...and when you say, “You are slow,” it means you are loose, no? The mind is strong and the act is firm...and light...and deep. But, I don’t run. If you want to be a surgeon, it takes you seven years to get there and then seven more years to practice it, you know, to be an absolute man or woman who could say, “There I am. I am a surgeon.” There are people here...they do things like...they say I want to be actor within a year because I look this way or I look that way or because I did a hit. Screw that. You did a hit, that does not make you anything. And this is the big joke in this industry...We have people that are stars, bankable, but very bad actors. And we are called the same thing...Actors and actors. I don’t feel close to these people, me, personally.
Bianca: Is that why actors who train on the stage, maybe because of the slowness and the experience, seem to excel?
Simon: In the stage you have a philosophy. No matter if you come from the stage or film, or from what, I don’t know, but as long as you have a philosophy, you can go somewhere. You can be someone...be someone not in a social way...but be someone in a human way. As long as you have a philosophy, you have a point of view, you have a vision.
Bianca: I guess the stage is a like a tool, because of the practice and the repetition. It gives you the time to develop philosophies.
Simon: Yes, of course. There is no cutting room, there is no editing. There is nothing. No. If you’re there, you’re there. It’s one long shot. How’d you say that in the cinema in America?
Bianca: A long tracking shot with no cuts-
Simon: Yes, it’s one long tracking shot.
Bianca: Simon, you sound very spiritual...Like you’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and meditation and thinking about life.
Simon: Listen, if you want to know yourself...Because as an actor you have to go into the human psyche and forbidden spaces and dark spaces and light spaces. It’s a quest to know yourself. If I don’t know myself, I cannot go play. It’s a long process, my work, my life and you notice, I never use the word career. You know, it’s life. So, I try to understand (big sigh) who the heck I am. To be truthful to be useful, to allow myself to be wrong and change track and continue on another one.
Bianca: So through your work you get to really know yourself better?
Simon: I try. I try.
Bianca: As a writer it’s always easy to learn about yourself through your writing but as an actor-
Simon: You can know about yourself by making shoes! Or cooking-
Bianca: As long as you are true to it.
Simon: If...Listen...if...When you make a shoe...Because I was a shoe-maker before-
Bianca: Were you really? Wow.
Simon: Yes. If you don’t see the feet inside the shoe, you do bad shoes. You have to imagine the foot inside the shoe. Like a chair. Top designers who make a chair, they have to see the body inside the chair. You have to see this volume...The chair is not important. What’s important is the volume inside the chair and for me acting is the same. Writing is the same. Everything is the same.
Bianca: Do you read a lot?
Simon: I do, yeah.
Bianca: What kind of things do you read? Who is your favorite author?
Simon: I read many things...mostly Oriental things. I like Tolstoy. I like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher. I like the French. I like Rumi...I like Khayam...I like Sayat Nova. I like Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Plato. I like all these people who always try to make the human situation better. You know, who try to build something between manhood and ignorance. These people...Chekov...all these people I like.
Bianca – You said “Oriental.” What do you mean by Oriental?
Simon: Something that gives you access to knowledge without making you feel like you’re a fool. This is what it is to me. When I talk about Oriental writing it means that it is not hermetic, although sometimes hermeticism is important. I like Byron, I like American writers, I like French writers...I don’t have all the things in me now but anyway-
Bianca –Great. Anything else you would like to mention? Any new movies we should know about?
Simon – Some movies are coming out in France but I am not sure they will be out in America.
Bianca –Is it possible to obtain your movies on DVD in the US?
Simon –I am building a new web site so you can see things there soon.
Bianca –Fantastic. We can do a link from ADAA’s site so people will know about it.
Simon – Voila! There will be some film clips there. I will let you know.
Bianca –Will you be coming to American anytime soon?
Simon – Yes, sometime in the next year, I will let you know.
Bianca –Thank you, Simon. It was great getting to know you.
Simon – Thank you.
* * *
(Director and Producer of “Screamers”)
By Bianca Bagatourian
Carla Garapedian is the Director and Producer of “Screamers” featuring System of a Down, which was on theatrical release in the U.S. and Canada in 2007 and just released on DVD by SONY BMG. Before making “Screamers” Carla directed a number of documentaries for British television on wide-ranging human rights subjects – from women in Afghanistan (Lifting the Veil), to children in North Korea (Children of the Secret State), to war crimes in Chechnya (Dying for the President). Just before Screamers she produced two films – the student movement in Iran (Iran Undercover) and an inside expose about a coup in Equatorial Guinea, involving Mark Thatcher (My Friend the Mercenary). In the last year, she has been touring the world with “Screamers” and sat down with Bianca Bagatourian to catch up.
Bianca: You presented Screamers in Armenia last year. What kind of reception did it receive?
Carla: The film was commercially released in Yerevan at the Moskva Kino theater. We got a lot of press for it, partly because the band is very well known there – Serj Tankian had visited the year before and was received like the rock star he is – with people tracking him everywhere he went! So when we opened the movie there was a certain level of excitement which you don’t usually find with a genocide documentary. The idea of showing different genocides in the same film was new to many of the people who saw the film. Also, putting our issue – the Armenian Genocide -- as a human rights issue – that was a new thing as well. So I think the film was eye-opening for people there … it also showed Turkish denial in all its many forms – and I think that was a surprise to Armenians in Yerevan, too. They know about it, of course, but seeing it, in action, is another thing altogether. This made it real to them.
Bianca: You showed the film on Capitol Hill, what was that like?
Carla: We’ve had three screenings in Congress … the biggest one was not long after the film’s premiere, in January 2007. The Congressmen who appeared in the film came to the screening, along with staffers, think-tank experts, members of the Armenian community, members of the Azeri community, and different lobby groups and representatives from the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association. It was a very charged atmosphere – with people standing in the aisles.
One woman representing a Turkish American group asked afterwards why we only emphasized the ‘dark side’ of Ottoman history; and didn’t I know that thousands of Armenians live and work in Turkey now – peacefully, she implied. Two days later, Hrant Dink was murdered. There was an Armenian living and working in Turkey who was murdered outside his work-place. And while I know this lady had no idea that would happen, it was a real irony. As for the Congressmen – to be sitting through all that heavy metal music … you have to applaud System of a Down for keeping them glued to their seats! The bottom line is, our politicians know the power of popular culture – and for genocide denial and genocide recognition to be a subject in the movie theaters … well, I think they knew it was essential for them to be a part of that experience.
Bianca: Where did you first come up with the idea for this?
Carla: I was invited to sit outside one of System’s concerts in 2004 at the Greek theater, handing out pamphlets for the Armenian Film Foundation, headed by the filmmaker J.Michael Hagopian. The band was showing excerpts of one of Michael’s films before their commemorative Souls Concert that year. I met fans from all over the L.A. area, of all different nationalities, ethnicities and economic groups – the band has a very far-reaching influence. And guess what? Those fans already knew about the Armenian genocide from the band – from the band’s lyrics, and their advocacy. I was already thinking about making a film about the New York Life Insurance case – which my uncle Martin Marootian was the chief plaintiff for. A colleague suggested I try to reach System of a Down about making a documentary. When I finally met Serj Tankian, he wanted the film to be broader, about all genocides. And the BBC, who got involved, thought that was an interesting idea – especially to include Samantha Power and her new book, A Problem from Hell, which had just won a Pulitzer Prize. So a lot of things came together to spur the project on.
Bianca: It must have been a lot fun working with System of a Down, do you want to elaborate on that a bit?
Carla: They are an extremely talented group of musicians – so just being around them is inspiring. They are also humble, friendly guys – which helped me a lot, because, to be frank, I was a little intimidated by them at first. That heavy metal environment is scary enough – until you get close to it and see it is really about people who are into the music! Although there are great challenges in filming live concert performances – especially with the crowds that come to System’s concerts – there is a basic element of excitement that surrounds every performance. Just being around that is inspiring. Every concert is electric, something I had never really experienced. So while it was really hard work, that exposure to the sheer charisma and electricity of System of a Down was the most positive experience I had making the film. That – and meeting their fans!
Bianca: Was it difficult making the film and being immersed in the subject of Genocide day after day?
Carla: Absolutely. The film researchers working with me were also affected by the footage they were seeing. There was much worse material that we chose not to include in the film – but of course, we had to see it first! It is important, I believe, to measure one’s response to these traumatic pictures and use that reaction as a kind of barometer. So I knew if I was upset by seeing something, probably the audience would be as well – hardened as I am to seeing these things. The challenge is not to overwhelm the viewer with too much. Last night we showed the film at UCLA, and one older lady told me, “You know, I didn’t think I was going to like that music, but I started to look forward to it just to escape from those awful pictures!” How’s that for enlisting a new heavy metal fan? Seriously, though, sometimes the horror of what I was seeing got me down so much, that I felt defeated. Especially, the footage from Rwanda – that is really awful, because it is in color and the people have just been murdered – so you feel you are really there, fully exposed to the horror of the act. When I got down, all I needed to do was to remember that showing this footage is a sign of respect for the dead. To not recognize what happened to them is to deny them the basic dignity they deserve. Genocide is about the murder of individuals. Sometimes this point is forgotten – it is as if genocide is some kind of disease or natural disaster which people have no control over. We know that is not true – and seeing the bodies is the proof. Sometimes when I am sitting in the movie theater, seeing the film, I say a silent prayer when I see those bodies, as if, again, it is the right thing to do to mark their deaths.
Bianca: Do you feel you achieved everything you had set out to achieve from the beginning with this film?
Carla: If we had achieved the passage of the Genocide Resolution in Congress, I could say “yes!” Until that happens, though, I will feel it is the one missing step. We have, though, pointed out the hypocrisy of western foreign policy to large numbers of people around the U.S., Canada, Europe and Latin America. Many more people know about the Armenian Genocide, and Turkey’s continued denial of it, than before because of “Screamers” – and with the DVD release, that number will only grow. So it is like a stone thrown into a pond … with the ripples continuing to fan out. Only recently we heard that the Israeli Knesset was considering recognition of the Armenian genocide. I have worked very hard in the last year to reach out to different groups who have been the victims of genocide. A number of Jewish organizations have supported Screamers and recognized the Armenian Genocide. That is a very positive development. Also, we have shown the film in the British Parliament and the European Parliament – who have the power to influence Turkey at a crucial moment, with Turkey’s proposed membership into the EU. So appeasing genocide denial – that is something that “Screamers” exposed, making it more difficult for politicians to pander to us, as they have done before.
Also the DVD has an educational track on it, so that the film can be shown in schools for genocide education – that is a very important aspect of the DVD release. We just had screenings for the Homenetmen scouts – northern and southern region. Screamers was shown to discuss the whole issue of genocide recognition – it was really encouraging to hear the questions at the end of the film – our young people are smart. They just need the information to spur them on. Around the country, universitiy students are showing Screamers before April 24th – again to take the message out onto the college campuses. That’s important, too. That’s where the real Screamers are.
Bianca: I noticed Samantha Powers, who has recently been making news, is featured heavily in your film. What was working with her like?
Carla: She is a very articulate proponent of her thesis – that genocides repeat because we allow them to. In many ways, she has been an inspiration to a new generation of policy-makers. I would recommend her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” to anyone who is interested not only in what’s going on now, but what has led up to it. We did our master interview on the Harvard commons sitting on a park bench – with the boats on the river in the background, and bicycles going by – it was a very pleasant afternoon. An unpleasant subject, but beautiful surroundings! I will always remember that day.
Bianca: What are recent projects you have been working on and your plans for the future?
Carla: I have a couple of projects I am developing now – however, with Screamers now just out on DVD, I am still on the road – with screenings in Amsterdam and Berlin coming up soon. So I am one step forward with the new projects, and one step back with Screamers – but in a good way!
Before Screamers, I had just finished a documentary about mercenaries in South Africa and Zimbabwe. And before that, I was working in a number of foreign countries on human rights subjects. Most of this work was undercover. It would be difficult for me now to go back to doing that same kind of work. So it is a new time for me, to spread my wings and carve a new path.
Bianca: Do you still work with the BBC?
Carla: I have always been an independent contractor – I’d like to say that’s because I relish the freedom to choose my own projects. That’s certainly true -- I do. But to be honest, I think it is also because I have never really fit in anywhere – I am too British to be an American journalist, and too American to be a truly British journalist. The British hear my American accent and the Americans sniff out my British reserve. As one member of the band told me, “So you are an outsider wherever you are, right?” Right! I think being a rebel – an uneasy fit – isn’t such a bad recommendation for a film director. We have to be a little strange to see our visions through. It also means, though, that I need a very supportive group of family and friends – which, thankfully, I have.
Bianca: Do you plan to move back to Europe?
Carla: Well, as you know, Bianca, my flat in London is beckoning me to return! It’s in such a lovely peaceful oasis. I am always floating between the U.S. and Europe, as needed. There is something about being a Londoner that is very grounding … you really do feel connected to the world there. Then again, being here in L.A. I feel more connected to the Armenian community, because this is where I grew up. So I guess this means I will probably be a permanent nomad.
Bianca: Where do you get your inspiration?
Carla: My great, great uncle was the writer Raffi Melik Hagopian … he was a visionary … an intellectual and even a feminist of sorts, arguing for the equal rights of women. That’s one inspiration. My grandparents – on both sides – were also very strong inspirations in my life. On my dad’s side, my grandmother was a genocide survivor; on my mom’s side, her parents were survivors of the massacres in the 1890s. Later, when my grandmother remarried, I had a Swedish step-grandfather who also influenced me – he was one of the first people to work in the Ford Factory … he was very much a part of American history. And of course, my mother and father each instilled in me a strong sense of cultural pride and determination. My mother never lets me sit back and feel sorry for myself when the going gets tough. That has helped, particularly when the going got tough with “Screamers” – which, of course, it did. That’s the nature of the work. My dad, Leo Garapedian, was a Professor of Journalism and encouraged me to pursue my career in journalism, working abroad. I’m sorry he can’t be around to see the success of “Screamers” … but at least his friends and colleagues, including filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian have been around to see it … Michael has been a mentor and support, for which I am very grateful. His next genocide film, “Caravans Along the Euphrates” is a very moving account of what Armenians endured on the deportation routes. He has definitely been an inspiration to me.
Bianca Bagatourian is a playwright www.biancabagatourian.com and president and co-founder of the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance. www.armeniandrama.org
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Copyright © 2011, Bianca Bagatourian